***For The Late Mad- Hatter Journalist Benny Sachem, Take Two

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

There was a time when I would read everything that the mad-hatter journalist Benny Sachem wrote just like I did with the late "Doctor Gonzo," Hunter S. Thompson. Benny’s passing, aged 76, after a short illness, represented the end of an era. An era of far-flung, shoot- from-the- hip journalism that coincided with the jail-break notions of my generation, the generation of ’68, when he first made his mark on the first draft of the history of that “sweet jesus, what the hell were we doing” time. He will be fondly remembered in these quarters, like Thompson, not because I agreed with his (or their) political perspectives, or his cultural critiques but because, as a guy I respect, Kevin Callahan, a columnist for The Portland Gazette, pointed out one time when doing a retrospective of 1960s countercultural journalists, he represented that little space in the bourgeois press reserved for those who could thumb their noses at the bosses, and walk away still standing. Thompson as everybody knows, everybody from the back pages of the 1960s and 1970s knows, gored more oxen that one would think possible. But Benny did too.

Benny, like Thompson, went after, viciously went after which was the only possible way to do the thing, and do it right, one Richard Milhous Nixon. Yah, the guy who lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960, went away bleeding over everybody who would stand for it and spilled that same blood on everything he could get his grabby little hands around and came roaring back as the second coming of Count Dracula. In short as a President of the United States and common criminal who will forever replace guys like James Buchanan and Warren Harding as the bad boy of the White House. Benny went mano y man almost instinctively from Nixon’s first day in office calling him, on his nice days, nothing but a two- bit whore, and a bloodsucker who should have been wearing dresses(no offense to the women meant ) since he was so crooked that he was unable to put a pair of pants on. Like I said that was on his nice days. For the not so nice days please look the stuff up in the archives if you have time, and need a laugh during today’s version of the daily bummer coming out of Washington.

But see here was the beauty of a guy like Sachem, and Thompson too, he went after the thug Nixon when he was riding high during his Teflon first term back in the late 1960s when he was like some Madonna figure (mother of Christ Madonna not the entertainer) and most journalists were finding ways, finding many ways, to take a dive for the duration and bury their heads in the sand. And while they really headed for cover when the Nixon cutthroat gang (and that is being kind) hammered down after he was almost sanctified in 1972 after he beat a bush league politician like George McGovern like a gong Benny kept up the attack, exposed that faker for less than a two-bit whore. Anybody who wants to place that man ahead of the aforementioned Jimmy Buchanan and Warren Harding better peruse the archives of Benny’s work (and Thompson’s too) before stepping out of doors in this wicked old world with their defenses. Sachem was merciless in dragging Nixon down in the pits, into the pits of what a famous politician, one of the Kennedy boys, maybe Bobby of blessed memory I think, called Nixon whom he said represented the “dark side “of the American experiment. And he never let up beating Nixon like a gong while he down in the gutter with the common crooks, dope dealers, and hookers. Benny treated him rightly as just another night court denizen in need of a bail bondsman.

That wasn’t all though like Thompson Benny took on even bigger game in the American cultural night. (After all presidents, even Presidents of the United States, come and go.) Sacred mobbed up Las Vegas and its vengeful seeking of the American disposable dollar, the big hatted, bourbon-soaked untouchable Kentucky Derby from Thompson’s home state, and, Christ, this took real cojones, dismissing the football Super Bowl as just some drunken brawl and so much bad hubris. And Benny Sachem, maybe a little less famously than Thompson always did the same thing, always try to shed some light in dark places, with a little humor if possible, but with that damn flashlight nevertheless, on his various beats, mostly later at the Kansas City Herald Tribune.

Benny, from the same no holds barred school of journalism as Thompson, the notorious Gonzo school where a reporter actually reported stuff he thought about as well as the just the facts jack, not only took on old punching bag Nixon but he also skewered guys like Hubert Humphrey and that bush league George McGovern whom Thompson gave a pass to. See Benny, unlike Thompson, had no ill-defined, ill-advised political agenda to preserve so he didn’t have to give passes to those he was trying to influence, or in order to get some cozy one-on-one interview. One can hardly forget the time when Benny and the usually unflappable Senator McGovern almost went mano y mano on national television when Benny asked about his hidden young mistress living in some cheap out of the way motel back in Fargo, or one of those dank Dakota places. That was pure Benny, go for the jugular, and take no prisoners

Benny was even better as being the thorn in side of lesser politicians, the guys who wanted to make it to the top but didn’t, didn’t in more than one case because of some Benny expose. Like that time that Muskie, the guy from Maine who ran as Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and who was riding high before Benny got to his doctor who was issuing him morphine prescriptions under an assumed name. Jesus, a stone-cold junkie as President. Thanks Benny on that one. Or like the time he stopped Jimmy Brown, yah, the California guy who has been running for some office ever since Hector was a pup, in his tracks when he exposed the Mexican cartel cocaine connection that was funding his presidential bids back in the 1980s. And who was caught sampling the merchandise as well, right in public, claiming it was just a snuff from his little snuff box that some girlfriend had given like it was about 1750 or something. Kudos Benny.

But Benny was best known to the general public for his sports columns, for his disassembling of the disassemblers who people that industry, including some of his fellow sports- writers. Who can forget that expose of the famed football writer, Grantland Stevens, who it turned out was stealing his copy straight from the publicity department of the Chicago Bears and claiming it was his stone-cold own work. Or the time he dismissed the New York Yankees, a team he loved from childhood having grown up in the shadow of the stadium in the Bronx, as nothing but candy asses and pretty boys, overpaid as well. The stuff he said about the owner at the time is unprintable here. He even out bad hubris-ed [sic] Thompson on the Super Bowl calling it a worse show than some low rent drag queen review in the Village. And went on for about fifteen pages of pure Benny vile about it. Funny how right he proved to be now that we have had an endless number of those mid-winter bummers to foul up the air. There were too many individual player stories that he wrote to mention here but as a measure of his power by the end of his career he was persona non gratain most American sports locker rooms, including that of the saintly PGA. That is to his credit.

And of course, as well, you had to read Benny for his love of language, language that curled around an idea. Not some academic-trained “use this word here and that word there and please, not too many syllables because someone might either not understand the word or become offended by use of the reference.” He took more heat than one could shake a stick at for calling George Stevens, the baseball owner, a troglodyte, which of course he was (and Benny tracing his habits proved that to be true but everybody thought it was some off-the-wall sexual reference). One could go on and on with such examples but that one sticks in my mind.

Of course some of Benny’s’ characterizations would not be politically correct, and probably rightly, so these days, days when the slightest untoward word or murmur might sent somebody over the edge, or into the law courts, as when he called one professional lady golfer a daughter of Sappho and another a daughter of Lesbos, or some pleasing and pleasant black ball player an Uncle Tom, or ditto some Latino player Tio Taco. This though from a guy who faced serious governmental investigations when he defended the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the Young Lords in the public prints and others journalist shied away from him like it might be contagious. Worse was when he would call about every guy not hunkered down with weight and muscle“light on his feet,” or a hermaphrodite. He was vicious, there is no other word for it, in that regard when it came to wide receivers in football. He was an old tough tight end guy in a world that had gone soft, soft in their dreams, soft in their expectations. Fortunately most people who read his stuff were clueless on his references but in those days you could say that stuff an and not get called on the carpet for it since nobody wanted to have to prove they were, or were not, the way he characterized them. Not in court anyway.

Those mad-hatter days are gone in the 24/7/365 minute news flash world. A world I miss, and am not afraid to say so. Adieu Benny, warts and all.